Machines, such as mining trucks, are used for transportation of material from one place to another at a worksite. Such machines are constructed to carry a weight of a truck body of the machine and a weight of material that is present in the truck body. Repeated impacts on the truck body from loading and dumping through operational cycles and the truck body's oscillations due to adverse haul roads generate high forces that may result in development of stress concentrations on the truck body. Stress concentrations can reduce a fatigue life of the truck body.
Typically, such machines include front towers coupled to a front wall of the truck body. The front towers withstand the high forces induced by adverse haul roads and repeated impacts from loading and dumping. The front towers provide stability to the machine and are critical for transferring a portion of load from the material in the truck body to a frame of the machine. This load transfer occurs through a landing plate attached at a lower end of the front tower. The landing plate is typically attached to the front wall of the truck body. An area around a joint between the landing plate and the front wall is prone to fatigue cracking due to large displacement on the front wall and the loads being transferred through the front tower between the truck body and the frame. To overcome this reduced fatigue life, doublers and gussets are typically used, but they do not fully alleviate the problem in some designs.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,751,445 describes a front tower on a truck body for use with a mining vehicle. The truck body includes a truck bed including a canopy and a front wall. The front wall includes at least one front tower. The front tower includes two longitudinal plates spanning the front wall, at least one gusset plate transverse and connected to the longitudinal plates, and a landing plate transverse and connected to the longitudinal plates. The landing plates are configured to transfer load stress from the bed to a frame of a mining vehicle.